Speculative Fiction—an all-encompassing genre created to describe stories of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, and other stories that have an element of “What if...” in them. A story in speculative fiction is one that adds an element of the unreal, or asks, what would become of our society if history took a different direction at some important event? Fiction with a little something extra thrown in.—William D. Richards

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Thursday, May 10, 2018

Blasters of Forever by Cora Buhlert

About Blasters of Forever:

1985: Screenwriter Simon St. John makes his living writing toy tie-in
cartoons and dreams of finally getting his screenplay "People on a
Bridge" produced.

But one night, when Simon has just come up with
his latest creation, a group of time travelling cops known as the
Blasters of Forever, a portal opens inside his living room. Out of the
portal hop none others than the Blasters of Forever or at any rate,
people who look very much like them.

The Blasters explain that
they are from the future, where Simon is considered not just one of the
greatest creative minds of the twentieth century, but also the
inspiration for the time travel program that eventually led to the
formation of the Blasters of Forever.

However, not just the
Blasters of Forever are real. The villainous Doctor Chronos, sworn enemy
of the Blasters of Forever, is real as well. And so is his cadre of
time travelling assassins.

This is a short story of 5500 words or approximately 20 print pages.

Excerpt:

They burst out of the swirling time vortex to a fanfare of electronic music. The Blasters of Forever.
They were remarkable, sensational, awesome. More awesome than the Magnadragons, more awesome Dana Star and the Dynonoids, more awesome even than Ace Thunder and the Ultrasaurs and those had all been pretty damn awesome indeed. The Blasters of Forever, however, were the most awesome thing ever in the world of toy tie-in cartoons.
They were… plastic. Injection moulded ABS, painted in bright Day-Glo
colours, studded with iridescent plastic gems and partly coated with
metallic paint that was the latest nano-micro-whatever technology,
semi-experimental and pretty damn expensive.
They were truly awesome. Or at least they were supposed to be.
Because when Simon lifted them one by one out of the box, the big
cardboard box labelled “Design Prototypes! No Unauthorized Handling!”,
they looked considerably less than awesome. In fact, they looked like
cheap junk. Cheap junk made by forced labour in a squalid factory
somewhere in the Far East. And Simon was in charge of turning them into
the most awesome thing ever, this year’s must-have Christmas toy.
Simon was good at this, good at turning cheap junk into the most fucking awesome thing ever. He’d started out with Billy Galactic and the Magicdogs,
a line of stupid stuffed toy dogs that were, well, magic. All right, so
they toy dogs weren’t magic at all, though they had voice chips that
said things like “Abracadabra” and “Simsalabim” and broke down after
roughly five hundred activations. A lively kid could go through those in
two weeks.
Everybody had known that the Magicdogs were kind of naff, even
the manufacturer. But Simon had come up with a story about magical dogs
from outer space, stranded in an earthly dog pound and fighting crime,
the sort of petty crime that didn’t freak out the censors, of course.
The resulting cartoon, drawn somewhere in the Far East in an assembly
line studio that was probably right next to the toy factory and offered
only marginally better working conditions, had been a hit. It hadn’t
quite catapulted the Magicdogs into the top 5 of Christmas toys,
but it had sold more stuffed toy dogs with voice chips than anybody ever
expected. Not bad for a toy everyone in the know had expected to tank.
From then on Simon played in the big leagues. The Magnadragons
had been next. They were plastic dragons who changed colour when
exposed to hot water. The colour-changing thing had been the hottest toy
gimmick three years ago. Everyone had been doing it, even Barbie.
The story that Simon had come up with was about prehistoric dragons
living inside a volcano, trapped by hot magma (he’d initially misread
“magna” as “magma” and by the time he realised his mistake, it was too
late to change it), only to emerge in our time and fight crime.
Next came Dana Star And The Dynonoids, one of the rare action
toy lines aimed at girls. They were cheap plastic dolls with garish
neon-coloured hair and some kind of electric light-up action. Once Simon
was done with them, Dana Star was a princess from outer space. When her
evil twin Dee Dee Star usurped Dana’s throne, Dana fled to Earth with
her girl pals the Dynonoids, who just happened to be cyborgs with
special powers, since cyborgisation with a teen rite of passage in
Dana’s world, just as a nose job for overprivileged girls was in ours.
On Earth, they posed as a pop band. And fought crime, of course.Dana Star And The Dynonoids had been a huge hit, even in the
notoriously difficult girls’ action figure market. And Dana’s success
had landed Simon his biggest job to date, Ace Thunder and the Ultrasaurs,
last year’s must-have Christmas toy. The Ultrasaurs were dinosaurs that
could transform into vehicles for reasons best known to themselves. A
total Transformers rip-off, but the manufacturer had faith in the
product. And they had hired Simon to come up with the story that would
sell it to the public. And oh, what a story it was!
There was a palaeontologist (though Simon hadn’t been allowed to use
that term — too difficult for the kiddies), the implausibly named Ace
Thunder. He had a time machine — didn’t all palaeontologists? — and
travelled back in time to study dinosaurs. But the evil Dr. Cyberpunk
(Simon was still proud of that little in-joke) also travelled back in
time to turn dinosaurs into ruthless cybernetic killing machines,
because… well, that’s just what villains did, wasn’t it? Come up with
really convoluted and idiotic plans to conquer the world. However, the
heroic Ace Thunder saved some dinosaurs from Dr. Cyberpunk’s psychic
enslavement and took them back with him to the future, where Ace Thunder
and his Ultrasaurs battled Dr Cyberpunk and his Cybersaurs. It was all
total bunk, of course, but no one cared about such little matters such
as logic and scientific accuracy in what was in essence an extended toy
commercial.
Ace Thunder was still selling well and in fact, he and Dr. Cyberpunk
both had just returned to the Jurassic age to convert more dinosaurs
into Ultra- and Cybersaurs, so the manufacturer could sell even more
toys. But that was no longer Simon’s concern. Once the basic background
story was in place, his job was done.
Now on to the Blasters of Forever, his mission for this year’s
Christmas season. They were obviously time travellers, the silly name
suggested as much. Of course, time travel has also featured prominently
in Ace Thunder, which might be a problem. But on the other hand,
cyborgisation had featured prominently in both Ace Thunder and Dana Star
and no one had batted an eyelash at that. Dinosaurs and teen pop stars
were sufficiently different, so no one cared that they both happened to
be cyborgs.
Next question was, what did the Blasters of Forever actually
do? The toys, that was, not the characters. Because whatever stupid
feature the toys had — and they were almost all stupid — it had to be
incorporated into the storyline. So Simon picked up the prototypes,
began to play around with them a little, then thought the better of it.
After all, the last thing he wanted to do was accidentally break one of
the prototypes while trying to figure out what it could do. And the damn
things were always so damn breakable. During his second assignment,
he’d dumped one of the Magnadragons into a pot of scalding hot water and
permanently messed up the colour changing mechanism into an ugly,
mottled grey. And last year, he’d accidentally broken one of the
Ultrasaurs halfway through the transformation into a Lamborghini. The
manufacturer hadn’t been too angry, at least Simon’s clumsiness had
pointed out a fatal design flaw, that might’ve led to lawsuits and kids
swallowing things, if not corrected. But it had still been a costly
mistake.
So he reached for the documentation that accompanied the prototypes
instead. This wasn’t the sort of colourful booklets that accompanied the
mass-produced toys. No this was a sheaf of loose papers, badly typed
and badly xeroxed. There were design drawings, too, that might have
depicted anything from a toy figure to the top secret plans for an
underground nuclear facility. And finally patent applications,
documenting in excruciating detail what exactly this particular piece of
toy innovation could do.
It seemed they’d come up with something new for the Blasters of Forever. They were equipped with little lamps that lit up and a loudspeaker that emitted a ZAP sound. Nothing new there, Dana Star and her Dynanoids had been able to do that two years ago. But what was new about the Blasters of Forever
was that the little lamp and the loudspeaker were activated by an
infrared signal that was triggered when a kid hit the sensor on the
figure’s chest with an infrared toy gun. The toy gun was helpfully
included in the shipment as well, on the very bottom of the big
cardboard box. It was a wicked looking thing of black and gold plastic
that made wicked sounding noises when the trigger was pressed. The
infrared mechanism that activated the tiny lamps on the figures was also
surprisingly useful for switching the TV on and off — and so much
cooler than the regular remote control.
When the toys went into serial production, the enclosed documentation
said, every figure would also include a target disc the kids could pin
to their closes to play tag with the infrared guns, should they ever get
bored shooting at action figures. All of which, Simon had to admit,
sounded like a really cool idea. And one that was sure to be
controversial with parents, educators and the usual killjoys.
Okay. How to counter them and hopefully pre-empt any criticism they
might possibly have? Hmm, shooting at action figures they would probably
tolerate, after all they had tolerated it before. But shooting at other
kids, even if it was just shooting with glorified remote controls at
sensor discs pinned to their clothes? No way. That was glorifying
violence, glorifying killing, glorifying war. Unless…
It wasn’t really killing, of course. No, the Blasters of Forever were pacifists. All toy tie-in cartoon characters were, even the bad guys. And when the Blasters of Forever
zapped someone with their impressive looking blaster pistols, they
didn’t kill them. No, they just… sent them back to the future, whence
they all came, to stand trial for their crimes.
Yes, that was it! The Blasters of Forever were future cops,
travelling through time to track down criminals hiding out in the
distant past to evade the law. Of course, the criminals would be fairly
non-violent folks, the sort that never did worse than robbing banks and
maybe occasionally indulging in a little kidnapping and blackmail.
Nothing so violent and gory that it would wake up the guardians of
decency — and how tempted Simon was to at least once tag one of his
supervillain groups with that name.

About Cora Buhlert:

Cora Buhlert was
born and bred in North Germany, where she still lives today – after time
spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. Cora holds an MA
degree in English from the University of Bremen and is currently
working towards her PhD.

Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published
stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. She is
the author of the Silencer series of pulp style thrillers, the Shattered
Empire space opera series, the In Love and War science fiction romance series, the Helen Shepherd Mysteries and plenty of
standalone stories in multiple genres. When Cora is not writing, she
works as a translator and teacher.

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